of loyalty towards him, and abandons him as it did his greater uncle the moment he becomes unsuccessful. It never felt that it owed him allegiance, and how could it since he professed to hold from it? His government was based on a plebiscitum, and could it bind the nation? It was created by the people, was their creature, and can the creator be loyal to or bound by his own creation? The nation can be bound only by a power above itself and be loyal only to an authority that comes from a source independent of the people.
Louis Napoleon held from 1789, and had the weakness to believe in plebiscitums. He seems never to have understood that universal suffrage can only create an agency, not a government. He was a disciple of the political philosophers of the eighteenth century, who erected revolution into a principle. These philosophers of the eighteenth century made no account of the continuity of the national life, of national habits, customs, and usages, and assumed that the convention might draw up an entirely new constitution according to an abstract and preconceived theory, without regard to the antecedents or past life of the nation, and without any support in the spiritual or supernatural order above the nation, get it adopted by a plurality of votes, and safely rely on l’intérêt bien entendu, or enlightened self-interest, to preserve it and secure its successful practical workings as the fundamental law of the nation. The whole history of France for nearly a century, without any reference to our own experience, refutes the absurd theory of the philosophers, or sophists, rather. A French gentleman, still living, told us, before the recent collapse of the second French Empire, that he had witnessed seventeen revolutions or changes of government in his native
country, and he is in a fair way of living to see the number increased at least to a score. No government created by and held from the people can govern the people; and, if reason alone or the calculations of interest were sufficient to sustain a government, no government or political constitution would be necessary. Paper constitutions are worthless, save so far as they express the living constitution of the nation. “Constitutions,” Count de Maistre has well said, “are generated, not made”; and the merit of the American constitution is in the fact that it was born with the American people, not made by them.
France was originally constituted by the king, the nobility, the church, with some feeble remains of the old Roman municipalities, subsequently revived and expanded into the tiers-état. The balance of her original constitution had been disturbed, it is true; the church and the nobility had been greatly enfeebled by the inordinate growth of monarchy on the one hand, and the expansion of the communal power on the other; but these four fundamental elements of her national constitution still subsisted in more or less force down to the Revolution of 1789. That revolution swept away king, church, and nobility, and proclaimed the tiers-état the nation, without any political organization or power to reconstitute legal or legitimate government. No nation is competent to constitute itself, for till constituted it is only a mass of individuals, incapable of any legal national act. Since then France has been trying in vain to make something out of nothing, and been continually alternating between the mob and despotism—despotism suppressing the mob, and the mob deposing despotism. She at this moment has no legal government,
and the French people recognize no power able to reconstitute the state. Her old monarchical constitution, tempered by the church and her old nobility, and restrained by provincial customs, usages, privileges, and franchises, is swept away, and nothing remains of her political life that can serve as the germ or basis of reorganization, or the re-establishment of authority, competent, legally or morally, to bind the nation, restore order, and protect liberty.
Worse than all else is the fact that 1789 swept away the church as a power in the state, and left the state it wished to constitute without any moral support, or power not dependent on the nation to sustain it. It threw the management of public affairs into the hands of men and parties that had no faith in God, who hated or despised religion, and believed only in themselves and the perfectibility of the species. This was the greatest evil of all. A nation may be politically disorganized, and yet be able to recover and re-establish a legal government, if it retains religion as an organized power, independent of the nation; for it then retains a power that has its source in the supernatural, above the people, and able to bind the national will in conscience, and give consistency and a divine sanction to the national ordinations. The first Napoleon had sense enough to see something of this, and to understand that he could not reorganize disorganized France without calling in religion to his aid; he therefore solicited a concordat from the Holy See, and re-established the church. But he had not sense enough to see and understand that even the church could not aid him if holding from himself, or if subjected in her administration to his own or the national will. He
committed the usual mistake of secular sovereigns, that of insisting on keeping the control of the ecclesiastical administration in their respective dominions each in his own hands, of using the church to control his subjects, but allowing her no authority over himself.
Nothing can exceed the short-sightedness of secular sovereigns in seeking to keep religion in their respective dominions subject to their will as an adjunct of the police, rather than an independent power holding from God, and alike supreme over sovereigns and subjects. The present hostility to the church, even in old Catholic nations, is in no small measure owing to the fact that the sovereigns have sought to use her to preach submission, resignation, and patience to their subjects, and to uphold the authority of the government, however forgetful of its duties, tyrannical, or oppressive. They have sought to make her their instrument in governing or, rather, misgoverning their subjects, without the liberty to exercise the power which, as the representative of the divine authority on earth, she holds from God, to remind them of their duty to govern their subjects wisely and justly, to rebuke and place them under interdict, and even to declare their power forfeited when they persistently violate the law of God and oppress the people. They thus render her odious to the lovers of freedom. Hence we see the revolution far more bitter against the church than against the sovereigns, who, having rendered her odious by denying her the freedom and independence which are her right, and without which she can render no service either to power or to liberty, have everywhere abandoned her to the tender mercies of her enemies, in the vain hope of conciliating the revolution and saving
their own heads. They throw her now as a sop to Cerberus.
The power of religion to sustain authority against the insurrection and rebellion of subjects, and liberty against the tyranny of the prince, is in her being an organic power in the nation, but independent of the national will, holding from God, not from the nation or its sovereign, and free to declare and apply the divine law alike to prince and people. Nationalized, she has no support outside of the nation, no power not derived from it, and can give the nation only what it already has in itself. It must follow, not lead the nation, and share its fate, which it has no power to avert. What can the Russian Church do to restrain the tyranny of the Czar? Or the Church of England to check the progress of the revolution now going on and threatening to sweep away king, nobility, and the church first of all? What can it do before the democracy become omnipotent? Why is it that no Gentile nation has ever shown any recuperative energy, but because Gentilism, as the name implies, is nationalism, and the nation has in it only a national religion, and nothing outside, above, or independent of the national authority? The Gentile religion, deprived of catholicity, had to follow the nation, and to share its corruption and its fate. When the nation fell, it fell with it; and the nation, when it fell, fell for ever, and disappeared from the list of nations. Protestantism in its essential principle is a revolt against catholicity, and the subjection of religion to the national will. It is essentially a revival of nationalism, or Gentilism, and hence a Protestant nation has no recuperative energy, and, were it to fall, its fall would be like that of a Gentile nation, a fall without the power to rise again. So it must be with every nation that has only